To FIS colleagues,
I would like to submit four different comments, which have various dates
of reference and which I hope are not too late to be of interest. The
first
has to do with Kalevi’s article, the second with a comment by Stan
Salthe,
the third with corrections and amplifications of a previous entry of
mine
that pertains to Alex’s presentation and Steven Bindeman’s commentary,
the
fourth with a response from Professor Johnstone to whom I sent the last
comments on Gödel’s theorem.
1). Several weeks back, Plamen suggested that we look at Kalevi’s
article in
relation to meaning. What I found of particular interest in addition to
the model
of what Kalevi terms “meaning-making” is the use of an if/then
relationship in the
service of exemplifying “operations” that basically consist of a causal
sequence:
“IF a THEN DO b.” The sequence is a matter of perception and movement,
of perceiving
such and such, and doing such and such in turn, the sequence taking the
form of a rule.
Multiple sources in fact exist for exemplifying the significance of
if/then
relationships in the real-life-real-time lives of animate organisms:
Husserl writes directly and many times over of the centrality of if/then
relationships
to sense-making, in particular, the relationship of “the kinestheses” to
perception.
Infant psychiatrist and clinical psychologist Daniel Stern writes of the
centrality of
if/then relationships in the developmental lives of infants, describing
the relationships
as consequential relationships.
Psychologist Lois Bloom in her book The Transition from Infancy to
Language focuses
specifically on if/then relationships, describing them in terms of
relational concepts.
Further still, a striking confluence of thought is evident in the
writings of Husserl
and 19th century physicist-physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, namely,
in their recognition
of the central significance of movement in perception and their common
use of the procedure
of free variation, the latter a critical methodological dimension of
phenomenology that,
as in von Helmholtz’s “body-on” empirical variations, shows how
methodology subserves
epistemological ends (for references, contact msj).
2. Regarding Stan Salthe’s observation: Your "untethered to theories"
and "as they are"
is more problematic than it might seem. Even as fetuses we are becoming
entrained by our
cultural values and views. As well, consider that we are primates, and
animals as opposed
to being plants. We could arrange the constraints bearing upon ur
observations as a
subsumptive hierarchy: {material {living {primate {human {cultured
}}}}}.
I agree that a challenge definitely exists! (See also #3 below.) Whether
a matter of bracketing
and reducing phenomenologically or a matter of meditational “bare
attention,” the challenge of
being present to what is, unconstrained by “here is what I think” or
“here is what I believe,”
and so on, cannot be overlooked. The challenge exists in any pursuit of
veridical knowledge,
including that of science. All the same, regarding what I termed
“complex historical phenomena”
and the idea that “Even as fetuses we are becoming entrained by our
cultural values and views,”
I would like to add the following query and comments in defending the
possibility of meeting the
challenge:
I wonder if, in relation to cultural entrainment, reference is being
made to fetuses being aware
of people’s voices, for example, hence their language—its inflections,
tonalities, and so on--and
of musical sounds, hence a certain cultural milieu in which, for
example, certain instruments are
played, certain melodic lines and harmonics are characteristic, and so
on.
Yet before this time (which begins around the 16th week of pregnancy),
other sensory faculties
have been developing, notably tactility and kinesthesia. The sequence of
development of embryonic
neural tissue in fact underscores a significant point. As Swedish
medical people (Furuhjelm,
Ingelman-Sundberg, and Wirsén 1977, p. 91) document, at eleven weeks,
“[m]uscles are already at
work under the skin and their movements become gradually more
coordinated by the developing nervous
system. The lips open and close, the forehead wrinkles, the brows . . .
rise and the head turns. . . .
this is no heavyweight exercising his muscles—the fetus weighs three
quarters of an ounce, the weight
of an ordinary letter.” In short, insofar as tactility and movement are
the first neurological
sensory systems to develop, cultural entrainments necessarily originate
on the basis of an
evolutionary background and heritage, that is, on a background and
heritage that is prior to
culture and that in fact continues to be operative and significant,
whatever the cultural entrainments.
We can appreciate this fact via Darwin’s succinct observation: “Seeing a
Baby (like Hensleigh’s)
smile & frown, who can doubt these are instinctive—a child does not
sneer” (Darwin 1987, Notebook M,
No. 96, p. 542).
I would add that a hierarchy is commonly a ranked order, whereas
historically and developmentally,
that is, from both a phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspective, the
membranes, so to speak, are permeable.
3). I would like first to correct what, on the basis of received
comments, was a less than exact
specification of what I meant by descriptive foundations.
If we are intent on unwrapping the structure of life, of world, of self,
of cells, and so on, and so on,
do we not have to begin with the phenomenon itself, observe it, in Mark
Johnson’s word, “listen” to it
before packaging it in ready-made terms? Being present to what is, is
challenging. Being present to
what is without the usual body armor, so to speak, is similar not only
to the initial phenomenological
practice of bracketing, but to the Theravada (Vipassana) meditational
practice of ‘bare attention’.
Before naming anything, much less before responding to it in any way,
one lets the experience of what is
present have its say. In this way, one gets to know what is present in
the most exacting ways and is
therefore able to describe it in the most exacting ways. Descriptive
foundations are built on just
such an observational, experience-based process of knowing. Listening,
precisely in Mark Johnson’s sense,
can and does indeed lead to precision in describing. It may well be
because there is a stillness in
listening . . . whether we are listening to a Bach cantata or listening
in the same mode of stillness to
what is.
Describing what is listened to may nevertheless prove difficult. As
Husserl remarks in relation to the
nature of flux in his discussion of the “temporally constitutive flux”
of internal time consciousness
(a consciousness Alex refers to in the first section of his
presentation), “For all this names are lacking.”
In short, describing may prove difficult because flux designates
dynamics, as in, to quote Husserl again,
the fact that “consciousness of the world is . . . in constant motion.”
In this context, I would add that, whatever the academic domain,
received wisdom can and at times does
lead astray. It can do so not only by overlooked semantic vacuities but
by a disregard of real-life,
real-time experience. With respect to the latter, received wisdom, aided
by dictionaries, defines movement
as a “change of position,” and, aided by objective measurements, defines
it as a force in time and space.
In both instances, received wisdom fails to accord with the fact that
any and all movement creates its own
force, time, and space, which is why we describe a movement--movement
itself--as jagged, for example, or
as intense, or as abrupt, and so on. What we overlook or disregard can
deflect us from insights into X
or the nature of X.
I would also like to correct my singling out Jane Goodall’s years of
dedicated study as setting the
original gold standard for observational-descriptive work. Charles
Darwin obviously set the original
gold standard and was followed by others such as Adolph Portmann. In
fact, Darwin’s last book—-The
Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms with
Observations on Their Habits—-should
perhaps be required reading for anyone concerned with “the bodies we are
not,” with the mental powers
of such bodies, and the role such bodies have played in the history of
the world.
What was said above about the stillness in listening is pertinent to the
silence Steve Bindeman describes.
In both instances, one is listening to what is. Along this line of
thought, and specifically with respect
to metaphysics and metaphysical claims, I quote from a book by a
Buddhist-trained psychoanalyst
(Mark Epstein in Thoughts without a Thinker):
There were in fact fourteen subjects that the Buddha repeatedly
refused to discuss, all of them
searching for absolute certainty:
1). Whether the world is eternal, or not, or both, or neither.
2). Whether the word is finite (in space), or infinite, or both , or
neither.
3). Whether an enlightened being exists after death, or does not, or
both, or neither.
4). Whether the soul is identical with the body or different from it.
4). What follows below is an attempt by Professor Johnstone to clarify
what he earlier wrote:
A better illustration of the point I am trying to make is the following
sentence:
‘The statement that I am making right now is true.’
The sentence seems to make a statement, but in fact it says nothing. It
is vacuous, and the
question of whether it is true or false is not decidable.
Semantic self-reference results in pseudo-statements of the sort that
say nothing.
Syntactic self-reference is in principle fine. However, when certain
syntactically
self-referential combinations of symbols in formal systems are given
their intended
interpretation in a natural language, they turn out to make semantically
self-referential
pseudo-statements.
Such is the case with Smullyan’s sentence, ‘-PN(-PN)’. Interpreted in
English as a grammatically
correct sentence, what it says is semantically self-referential.
The same is true of Smullyan’s sentence (in Forever Undecided) ‘This
statement is not provable in
formal system S.’ Like the sentence ‘This statement is true’, it says
nothing.
Likewise, when the Gödel sentence is fully interpreted in English as a
statement in arithmetic
(which incidentally it is not), it makes a semantically self-referential
pseudo-statement, one
that says nothing.
Since the Gödel sentence says nothing, it cannot say of itself that it
is not provable.
Consequently, it is incorrectly characterized as a sentence that says
something true but not
decidable in formalized arithmetic.
Many thanks for your kind attention!—and
Cheers,
Maxine
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